


A Culturally Explicit Instrument

by StalwartNavigator (Fallwater023)



Series: Dragonslain [1]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Background Relationships, Battle of Five Armies Fix-It, Culture, Dubious Science, Everybody Lives, Folk Music, Gandalf Meddles, Gen, Guys they're living in an abandoned mountain full of gold and winter is coming on, Hobbits, Humor, M/M, Music, Musical Instruments, Musicians, Post-Battle of Five Armies, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Survival, Wargs, dubious horticulture, you can't eat gold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 19:56:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3181217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallwater023/pseuds/StalwartNavigator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There was a sudden shriek of feminine rage. It was shortly followed by two clangs, a thump, and a thunderous whimper. </p><p>Thorin groaned. ‘Oh Mahal, she’s found another one.’</p><p>Bilbo shrugged, philosophically. ‘Look at it this way, Thorin,’ he patted the King Under the Absolutely Insane Mountain, ‘Would you rather she be using it on the dwarves?’”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Culturally Explicit Instrument

The Deep Council of Erebor sat at a table in the merchant’s quarter, looking grimly at their ledgers, each other, the walls, or the ceiling. Around them, the No Longer Lonely Mountain buzzed with life. Every dwarf of Ered Luin between thirty-five and a hundred seemed to have come back, and a good number of the Iron Hills warriors had brought their families over rather than make the journey back while injured. The news had gone far and wide through dwarvish circles that Smaug was dead and the King Under the Mountain was on his throne; more families and couples had come from their scattered Southern settlements, and journeyman dwarves made their journey in from the smithies and taverns of men. It had taken nearly a month just to organize them all, and more showed up every day. 

Of course, they were immediately faced with the problem of feeding, clothing, and employing all their new citizens. There was plentiful work to be done burying the dead, cleaning the halls, making safe the tunnels, preparing food, restarting the great forges and salvaging the lost treasures of ages. There was also plentiful gold. The problem lay in connecting work to pay, and finding markets that would change gold for provisions. 

One member of the Deep Council was conspicuously absent. There was also a tray of tea, stew, and pipeweed on the table. The two are connected, but not in the way a watcher might think. 

The dwarves at the door welcoming new citizens and taking their names for registry had nearly fainted when a great caravan of round wagons had rolled up and five creatures later revealed to be hobbit women came to organize the entry of half the Shire into the Less Lonely Mountain. 

It had all been Gandalf’s fault, of course. Thorin had to have a strong drink and a lie-down when he heard. 

That was a full season ago. In that time, the hobbits had gently but thoroughly taken over the business of cleaning and salvaging, leaving more dwarf labor free for the heavy and intricate labor of reopening Erebor’s smithies and making her halls safe. They had also started gardens on the slopes, a project never successfully accomplished before. Dwarf children had actually started asking for more hobbit greens in their bowl, which said something about the scarcity of rations in the Rather Crowded Mountain. 

Bilbo had been instrumental in bringing together the two races. Thorin had repealed his exile, and he was now renowned among dwarves for his slaying of Smaug, while the Shire dwarves were mostly Tooks and Brandybucks and held him up as something of an idol for his grand adventure. He was also of sufficient standing to take precedence in the social system of hobbits everywhere, which baffled the dwarves for its subtle ambiguity. 

“It’s not that I can _order_ them to do anything,” Bilbo had told Thorin over a late night cup of stew and desk of paperwork, “Or that I really outrank them in the way dwarves think, with crowns and thrones and royal decrees and everything. They’re just more interested in my projects than whatever they might otherwise do.” 

This _interest_ had shown itself in a wholesale dedication of hobbit labor to feeding, clothing, and sheltering the people of the Busy Mountain. Under the eye of Tansy Proudfoot and Rosaly Took’s team in the kitchens, one meal suddenly stretched into three; it was soup and stew all day long, yes, but good hearty stuff that kept strength in the limbs and warmth in the belly, down in the chilly deep. Bands of young hobbits roved through the old living quarters with buckets, rags, and gleeful expressions, chasing out a hundred years of vermin. Others watched the dwarrows while their parents worked, or labored ceaselessly in the mountainside gardens. 

Bilbo didn’t even tell them what needed doing. He just set his hand to helping and help was brought with the hands of a hundred other hobbits. It was nothing short of remarkable. 

That selfsame remarkable hobbit shuffled into the meeting now, with a fresh pot for the tea and a longsuffering expression. 

“Thorin,” he said, in that tone that meant trouble. The King, his nephews, and half the Company looked up; the rest of the Company and other Council members kept their eyes on their work. “I hope you weren’t very attached to the upper reaches. Or that, er, secret door. Or the statues on the Mountain face.” 

“Which statues?” Thorin asked warily. 

“Er, all of them. Rorimac’s gone and gotten his siblings to plant them over.” 

Thorin closed his eyes, and said a little prayer to Mahal for patience. It was the way of Mahal to be enduring, and it seemed that Yavanna’s children were dead set on nothing but change. “How did he plant over the interior chambers in the upper reaches?” 

Nori suddenly looked shifty. Thorin eyed him, and was unsurprised when Bilbo admitted “Nori’s cousins from the south may have been involved. No, no, Thorin! Don’t, ah, don’t get up, there’s nothing to worry about! Really! Really, there were some old plate windows they found in Dale that hadn’t been shattered, but about half of the house they were in was missing so Bard let Rory take them up and Horan helped knock out the ceiling _no!_ Don’t! Let me finish, and put in the plates so now we’ve got a greenhouse!” 

Thorin stopped in his tracks and frowned a more ponderous frown than usual. Bilbo sighed and let his arms relax, though he kept his hands on Thorin’s shoulders in case the King tried to push past again. “A greenhouse. This is a hobbit invention?”

“Yes, yes, it lets you grow crops in the winter, _Thorin!_ We’ll get half again as much grain as if we left those reaches empty.”

A sudden whoosh of breath around the table followed this announcement. The other half of the table looked up and everyone immediately started scribbling down figures, pointing out lines to each other and arguing half in Khuzdul, half in Westron. 

“Was it something I said?” Bilbo muttered to Thorin, looking at the suddenly bustling room. He looked back to find Thorin pulling his classic smile-not-smile, where his mouth went soft and his eyes went warm without actually cracking a grin. 

“Burglar,” Thorin murmured, “Riddler and Barreler and Lucky Number, you may have saved us.” 

It took Bilbo another minute or two to grasp, and Thorin had to grip his arms firmly and sit him down in a chair when his knees went loose. “I hadn’t realized it was that bad,” he muttered, half to himself. 

Thorin pulled up his own chair. “It was a close thing. We had considered taking out credit in the Iron Hills, but them with so many men wounded or missing on our behalf - it would have strained our relations when we can ill-afford bad feeling. And we may have needed to start turning away dwarves at the gate.”

Bilbo put his head between his knees for a moment, then straightened and pulled up to the table. “We can do the same for the rest of the upper reaches, if there is glass or crystal to be had. It must be clear enough to let sunlight through, and there must be a lot of it. Colored glass will not work. We’ll also need skilled workers to open the ceilings and exterior walls and knock out the interior walls without bringing down the roof on our heads. And sealant for the window seams, or it will be too cold to grow, and the smithy crews ought to fire up the kilns in the workshops directly below to keep the crops warm through the winter. Troughs to collect the snow once it starts, I think. Oh, and we’ve some varieties of mushroom that do very well in dark and cool places, if you could direct Rory and his crew to a suitable empty room. If there are any privies that haven’t been used since Smaug, the earth ought to be rich enough…” he tailed off into a debate with Nori and Sanna on the crop capacity of the Teeming Mountain, punctuated with sips of tea. 

Later, Thorin was following Bilbo to the upper reaches to see this greenhouse business when they heard the unmistakable cry of a warg. Many had been left riderless, wounded, or otherwise abandoned in the northerly retreat of the orcs. They remained a serious threat to immigrants and residents alike, so dwarvish guards worked diligently to keep the fearsome war-wolves at bay. 

Every so often, however, one of them got through. 

Thorin and Bilbo had only the barest of moments to trade a glance. It was a very deep and meaningful glance, sharing in a breath the deep and heartfelt friendship that had brought them both to this moment: King Under the Mountain and his faithful Dragonslaying Burglar, in a mountain full for the first time in a century of life and love and hope. Two men from two worlds, on the brink of a new future where dwarrow children could play in the halls of their ancestors. It was a future that was bright, and precious, and held always in the forefront of their minds. It was a future that, like life in this dangerous world, was all too fragile and could end in the most bloody and painful of ways. 

There was a sudden shriek of feminine rage. It was shortly followed by two clangs, a thump, and a thunderous whimper. 

Thorin groaned. “Oh Mahal, she’s gotten another one.”

Bilbo shrugged, philosophically. “Look at it this way, Thorin,” he patted the King Under the Completely Deranged Mountain, “Would you rather she be using it on the dwarves?”

Lobelia Sackville-Baggins had, of course, led the charge of young hobbits from the Shire to Erebor. The promise of wealth and status on her return and an entire nation of men to boss around had been irresistible. To date, she had settled one century-long blood feud and started two more, taken charge of the clothing stores and the seamsters who were making over what old garments they could, improved the quality of light by half again in the middle chambers almost single-handedly, and acquired an epithet. Dwarvish debate on whether she could as an outsider be awarded an epithet remained lively and carefully concealed from the woman herself. 

Most had taken the middle ground and called her by her epithet in Westron, leaving the Khuzdul translation unspoken. 

Lobelia Wargscolder threw open the stairwell door. “Well?” She demanded in her Octave of Command, “Come in! What are you lot standing around for anyway, King or no King Under the Bloody Catacomb, no excuse to be loitering about when honest folk are working - ,” Neither wondered how she had known they were waiting. Lobelia had a sixth sense for the presence of eavesdroppers and had once embarassed Nori by catching him out. The professional thief had a midlife crisis and nearly left the Overloaded Mountain as a result.

The greenhouse could hardly be called a greenhouse yet. The whole ceiling and a segment of the wall had been replaced with great clear glass panes, and Thorin had a moment of strange vertigo on feeling the sunshine and looking out over the slope without feeling the stiff mountain breeze. A couple of Tookish girls were bringing in barrows full of soil, brought up by hobbit chain from the battlefield and suspiciously dark. It struck the King Under the Occupied Mountain that here was a touch of dwarvish vengeance: his people would be fed this winter almost literally on the blood of their enemies. 

Floor segmented into deep trays for planting, buckets of rainwater and sacks of seed along the wall, late afternoon sun and the thick smell of turning earth in the air. It hardly felt like a dwarvish mountain at all. With the cheerful Westron chatter in high women’s tones, he almost felt he was back in the Shire. A younger and more desperate dwarf he had been then. Bilbo caught his eye, they traded nods, and Bilbo was thanking Lobelia for her time. 

On his way out, Thorin gave Lobelia and her new warg a wide berth. It always disturbed him to see the vicious animals cowering at her feet, as though recognizing that here was a bitch they could never match for heinousness, and begging for approval. He eyed this one, a skinny adolescent dog-warg, and gave it another season or so before Lobelia kicked it to the curb. She never had much patience for the males, but had a soft spot for young ones, and this one looked well enough to go hunting and bring her gifts for the stewpot. 

“I,” Bilbo declared once they were safely down the stairs, “am _never_ going to get used to seeing a warg in a hobbit garden.”

“Nor am I well-accustomed to the litter behind the ironworks. But when the Wargscolder speaks - ,” Thorin began, 

“ - the wargbait obey!” Bilbo laughed, finishing the phrase that was fast becoming common in Ereborean parlance. That always gave him a thrill down in his scholar’s heart, for he felt that once a people could produce a phrase-turn of their own, they were close and strong enough to truly be a people. 

Evening drew on, and as they went deeper into the Undragoned Mountain, they wandered past a mixed band of dwarf lads and hobbit lasses, laughing and playing a merry tune. Three of them were dancing in a complicated figure of trading partners, and a fourth and fifth leapt into the circle as Thorin and Bilbo watched. 

Music in the Brimming Mountain sounded rather weird these days, as dwarvish fiddlers and harpists met hobbit pipers and squeezeboxers. Bilbo still did a double-take to hear a woman sing “Brandywine Bound” or “Gather in the Barley” with string drones under. Thorin still did a double-take to hear a woman sing at all, or a tune waltzing about with all these moving chords and no steady hum at the base of it. Neither were very musical themselves, but Thorin could hold his own as a singer and Bilbo’s wordsmithing had grown stronger with his travels. Of an evening, the door to a certain hobbit-burglar’s chambers might open and the door to a certain dwarf-king’s chambers might close, and the one might bring tune to the other’s lyric. But that was not heard so deep in the mountain, for the King and his Dragonslayer slept close to the stone. 

Everybody was working so hard, they really didn’t anticipate what happened next, though they really should have. 

Dinner in the Populous Mountain was a funny affair these days. The hobbits had no patience for the niceties of dwarf etiquette and pulled two truly giant tables up side by side in the great golden-floored hall. It happened to be nicely central, and the reflections kept it well-lit and cheerful for the hobbits who spent their days in the belly of the earth. There, peasant pulled up a seat between miner and noble, across from soldier and merchant. Thorin and the Council sat at a smaller table, set acrost the end of the long tables, neither higher than nor farther from their people. 

It was stew again tonight, but dwarf and hobbit alike labored so hard that nobody cared. Even the children were hungry after a long day of dusting, sorting clothes, squishing spiders, and running messages. Nobody ate very much, for the hobbits still insisted on their seven meals a day. Even the Iron Hill folk who lived in security thought this a touch excessive, until they realized that the first meal was served five hours before dawn and the last at two hours before midnight. None were very large, but at home the Shirefolk liked to put out extra for guests and visitors. They didn’t take much sleep and often napped after their luncheon, in the hottest hours of the Shire day. Long after the dwarves slept and long before they woke, the hobbits labored in the fields and forests. 

In Erebor, the short rations meant first breakfast was a hard biscuit with potato in, while second breakfast was eaten with the dwarves and meant stew. Hobbits who assisted in the smithies and mines insisted that their dwarvish friends pack along an elevenses snack of more potato biscuit, and luncheon in the great hall was more stew. The hobbits napped, then brought around biscuits and vegetable mash for tea. Now it was dinner, and they would go back to work after sundown. Supper was leftover vegetable mash, and bed was a sweet relief from the work before they rose in a handspan of hours to do it all again. 

So this was their last big meal before noon the next day, and only another dragon could make them miss it. Drogo was thus alarmed to not find his cousin Marralin. She had promised to meet him and Horan and Rory for lunch, and it wasn’t like Marra to break a promise, nor forget one. He peered about, then leaned over the table and looked down the hall. Now that he thought about it, Coran and Gardenia were missing too - and he couldn’t find little Jonan. The kid had been barey out of his tweens when Gandalf called for volunteers, and he’d promised the Swales to keep an eye on their boy. 

Panicking a little now, Drogo stood on his seat, craned his neck, leaned out over the aisle - and promptly lost his balance when the great double doors boomed open and the most ungodly noise started up at the back of the hall. 

Years later, the old warriors at the table would admit to their grandchildren that they’d half-thought it was a call to arms. A good double handful of them jumped out of their seats and drew their weapons when the sound started. The rest drew their weapons when, in the absence of a foe to fight, the jumpers started in on each other. Arguments broke out among the unarmed merchants and peasants, older dwarves covered their ears as the noise grew louder, Bifur leapt up on the table and started jumping about with one hand in the air and the other on his hip. Some of the more lively dwarrows, thinking this marvelous good fun, joined in the quarreling or imitated Bifur. The quieter ones crawled under the table with their mothers and played pat-a-cake. All the while, the sound grew ever louder. 

It was a tremendous sound, with the clamor of battle and the howl of wargs in it. And yes, somewhere in there was the thunder of Smaug’s passing through the mountain and the boom of his voice. But there was a brightness to it, a skirl of moving and growing and light-footed dancing. And indeed, when you dared listen closer to the unbearably loud noise, it had a wailing tune over three buzzing drones. It was a marching tune, it was a dancing tune, it was a mischief-making tune. It demanded action. 

The Company craned their necks to see the source of the noise, just now coming into view. Sure enough, it was the missing Marralin Took, in her best skirt and jacket, with the most amazing contraption wound around her. 

“Mahal’s mercy, there’s more of them,” Bofur groaned as the doors boomed open again and three more wails joined the first. Coran son of Thorn, Gardenia Proudfoot, and Jonan Swale marched up behind Marralin, all wearing skirts for some reason (well, Coran was wearing an apron over short trousers, but it was the spirit that counted. Jonan looked quite fetching in a jumper-skirt borrowed from Gardenia). 

When people realized that the awful noise was coming from a quartet of instruments and was in fact music, the fighting petered out. A few of the younger dwarves started dancing, capering along like Bifur with a hand in the air and the other on the hip. 

Bilbo simply sat back and examined the new instruments with a scholar’s eye. It was a fascinating design in an impractical way; a leather bag with a rough assortment of wooden pipes stuck on, one in the mouth to inflate the bag, one in the hands to play the very hobbit-like melody, three slung over the shoulder and splayed every which way to feebly squawk out a drone in the dwarvish style of singing. None of the four were quite tuned to each other, nor to any key recognizable to hobbitkind. He supposed they were still works in progress. 

Impressive, he thought as the song ended. It only took them, what, two-odd months to invent a new instrument? 

With a last squeal, the players let their blowpipes drop and continued their walk up the aisle in a stunned hush. Hence it was perfectly audible when one of the Iron Hills nobles muttered something rude under his breath about the invention. 

In a trice, Coran had pulled a knife from his sock and was menacing the man’s beard. He growled something solemn in Khuzdul, and a flurry of argument in the dwarvish tongue followed. Bilbo strained his ears. Thorin sang in Khuzdul sometimes, but refused to translate. Having lived two years in the sole company of dwarves now, he could pick up certain cadences but no more. He thought he heard scorn, and pointed sarcasm, on both sides. It was tricky to pick out over the murmur of two-hundred-odd hobbits and dwarves. 

Thorin boomed something from the Council table, and everyone in the knot of argument shut up. Coran did a double-take but let the matter drop. The Iron Hills noble looked mutinous. Apparently the matter was settled. 

Catching Bilbo’s confusion, Thorin repeated his decree in Westron. “I congratulate these fine musicians on their fulfillment of the royal commission. In honor of our victory over Smaug and the orc hordes of Gundabad, these - ,” he paused and did a split-second Khuzdul transliteration, “ - bagpipes will be entered into the draftsheets of our luthiers and made common among the people of Erebor. Hear their thunder and remember the battle. Hear their song and celebrate our peace. So it shall be Under the Mountain.” 

He sat, to another explosion of murmurs. The four pipers looked immensely pleased with themselves. 

Bilbo leaned over, “You had no idea they were doing this, didn’t you?” he muttered lowly. 

“No, I did not,” Thorin muttered back. 

“Well, that’s alright then,” Bilbo grinned, and lit up a pipe of Old Toby. 

And all was well Under the Mountain.

**Author's Note:**

> "So long as there are bagpipers, there will be free people" - Anonymous priest to a funeral piper 
> 
> "Bagpipes are a culturally explicit instrument" - J.P. Baxter
> 
> I know little to nothing of how greenhouses and horticulturists actually work, let alone in a way consistent with the time period and culture. This might actually become a series if I like this AU enough, idk.


End file.
